the real me!

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At times I love listening to Eminem. Ok – some people may say some of the swearing in his lyrics leave a lot to be desired. I don’t think I agree. Much of the language is real, contemporary and an authentic expression of the reality of life. Sometimes the swearing may be there to shock, sometimes it is there as pure gritty expression.

Recently Radio 1 were playing a lot of his tracks and one track in particular, the Real Slim Shady, caused me to think and smile. The track has the line ‘will the real Slim Shady please stand up’. Following on from my post, 2 worlds, last week it made me smile to think I am asking a similar question of myself at the moment.

Will the real Rob Ryan please stand up!

Being alone, having time, thinking, dreaming, contemplating, praying, walking with God, running ahead of God … all of this ‘stuff’ is causing me to ask; ‘will the real Rob Ryan please stand up!’ Is the real me the robed deacon on a Sunday, is it the pastor to people in wetherspoons during the week, is is another gym user, is it a chaplain, is is a pioneer looking to develop something new, is it an observer of life, a friend of people, is it a dad, a husband, a friend.

Those are the public faces of the real Rob Ryan. But there are also the hidden, devious, selfish, indulgent, bad habit parts of identity which only those really close to me see, and maybe even only God see’s the real real authentic me.

My brain has space, and so ideas and questions are now starting to flow. Today I met with Brother Colin who is starting to speak wise words into my life. The voyage of discovery I am on is not just about discovering what will happen, but it is also about discovering who I really am in Jesus Christ. By that I mean what difference does my relationship with the creator make to who I am, because this relationship who am I in a real and everyday sense.

In reality, until now, my identity has been drawn from what I do and the role and responsibility I carry. Now that most of that has been stripped away I am released, in a way, to re-discover who I am. I am rediscovering my identity based on who I am rather than what I do.

It is quite an interesting, and sometimes painful, journey.

variety helps

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I have a fairly varied week this week ahead, by recent standards, and I think I will benefit from getting outside my patch so that when I return I can look again with fresh eyes and listen afresh to what is happening around me.

It’s amazing how quickly the body adapts to new surroundings and I am conscious that I feel very comfortable in most of the places that I hang out which may be a good thing. It is also true though that comfort leads to familiarity and with familiarity things are missed, or is it just we stop observing?

This week my variety has a few good highlights:
Wednesday – meeting up with Brother Colin who is a Franciscan friar in Canterbury and very kindly agreed to be my spiritual director.
also on Wednesday I am looking forward to watching Alice in the Cities and the newly found (to me) Rochester Film Salon. I love film and I like meeting new people, so I hope this evening is great – of course if anyone out there wants to come with me that would be cool too!

On Thursday late afternoon I am meeting up with a cluster of people I trained with to have a few drinks and chat about how things are going. It will be good to hear what is happening with other people.

Friday night I’m popping in on the Saints Alive celebration in the cathedral hosted by the Churches Together in Medway. Last year I spoke at this event and it will be cool to just be there as part of the congregation, see some old friends and catch up with what is happening in other parts of the city.

Other times through the week I hope to pop in on SPLAT, which is a fantastic holiday club run by Sarah. Seeing the enthusiasm on the faces of children and the creativity of the leaders is always a special privilege.

A change is as good as a rest my nan always used to tell me – actually I think it is much better.

not lost – just tired in space

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I am aware that I have been quiet here for the last few days. There are two main reasons for this; one being there has not been a massive amount for me to write about, and the other that I have been incredibly, and unusually, tired.

I am finding that the actual practice of being and waiting can be quite tiring.

It seems an odd thing to say. It is certainly an odd thing to experience. A few months ago I was enjoying a role with YFC which could see me leave early in the morning, drive to the other side of the country, speak at a couple of meetings, pop in on another team and arrive home late to repeat the process again the next day, maybe with the difference of using the train rather than the car. While that was tiring, the tiredness I am currently feeling is very different.

This tiredness seems to be a deeper tiredness, and I can’t really explain what I mean by that.

I do know that I am not really physically exerting myself, neither am I putting my brain under great pressure in moving from one activity to another. I am simply sitting and waiting to see what will happen today. Someone asked if I was going out to chat with people and my response was ‘no’, actually I am not. I am going out and waiting to see what God will do in the places I visit. I am asking why this process of waiting is so tiring.

I think it is so tiring because the waiting space is allowing space for ideas to grow and develop.

One thing I am noticing as I wait is that I am starting to consider things more deeply in an imaginative and creative way. When I was a child I did do a fair bit of dreaming when I should have been learning. In my waiting it seems that I an again finding this ability to daydream and imagine what could be. I guess this links to the prophet role I blogged about here a little while ago. In the past I have enjoyed tinkering with this, but time has always been a factor and I know I have had to draw the dreaming to a stop to enable something, a project or a retreat session, to be completed.

It seems now I have the space to think and go deeper.

On my desk I have a three postcards, and one that jumps out at me as I write today and it says Big Ideas need Big Spaces. It was a card I picked up in a pub in London advertising the Deisel Wall 2008 competition. The postcard has been there for a few months and now I am starting to understand the idea the statement is getting at.

The world we live in places extreme demands on us. It’s ironic, in a sense, to realise that the machines we have that were planned to make life easier for us have inadvertantly had the opposite effect. Instead of making life easier, they have in fact increased the expectation we place on ourselves and upon others to respond and perform. This has resulted in us working longer with boundaries of home and work melting into the shape of a laptop and so space to dream and create to diminish.

Seven or eight weeks on of waiting and having space to observe, to pray, to be available and I am finding that only now is my mind just starting to find the ‘big space’ that it needs to be able to start to imagine what is possible. I don’t know where this leading – but I do know it feels pretty weird – but then having space in a packed world is bound to be odd!

the reds go top!

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I know I have a few Chelsea fans … but I can’t let this day go past unmarked. The first team I ever saw play when I was 8, the first team I ever considered myself to support since then … deservedly in their rightful place at the top of the premiership, 3 points clear!
Great weekend for football with a Gills win too!

church battle!

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Mark points to this which made me laugh – obviously fake but funny non the less!

Burma update .. success and more action

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Dear Friends,

One week ago we asked you to boycott Cotton Traders as they were sourcing clothes from Burma. Thousands of you wrote to the company, and just three days after the boycott began Cotton Traders caved in and announced they were pulling out of Burma. Thank you to everyone who pledged to boycott the company, your actions have deprived Burma’s generals of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

HELP US CUT THE GENERAL’S FINANCIAL LIFELINE
Hundreds of companies are still helping to finance the Burmese regime. One of them, Lloyd’s of London, is particularly important to the Burmese regime as Lloyd’s companies insure businesses in Burma – including a regime owned company.

Without insurance no company would be able to invest in Burma. Lloyd’s now refuse to respond to our calls, emails and letters. We need your help to make them listen – we need you to write to the bosses of Lloyd’s directly and tell them why they must stop insuring the companies that fund the Burmese regime : http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/lloydsaction.html

TAKE ACTION NOW
Your email will also be copied to the Lloyd’s companies that we know are actively insuring companies in Burma. The Cotton Traders victory proves that these email actions work. Every single email counts, write now: http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/lloydsaction

The British Government doesn’t want Lloyd’s to be involved with Burma. They wrote to Lloyd’s chairman, Lord Levene, in September telling him that. However our sources inside Lloyd’s tell us that nothing has changed, members of the Lloyd’s market are still allowed to insure companies in Burma.

We need your help to make Lloyd’s listen, please email them now:

Thank you,

Johnny Chatterton and the Burma Campaign UK team

2 worlds

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I’m loving my new role – its tough a lot of the time, but it gives me lots of opportunities to smile and sometimes that maybe because of the irony of the situations I find myself in, or because of the way God is surprising me.

This weekend I deaconed at the Eucharist on Sunday morning. This is still something I am getting used to. One of the roles of the deacon in this service is to process in with the gospel and later process to the centre of the church before reading from it. This week I was handed the thurible and had to incense the gospel before reading. While my anglo-catholic friends would have been proud of me, my YFC friends would be asking what was going on. As for me … I smiled thinking here I am, an ordained pioneer minister tasked with developing a fresh expression of church, wearing an alb and stole, with a thurifer standing in the middle of the second oldest cathedral (over 1400 years old!)in the country.

It made me smile to think that I stand in two distinct worlds. On a Sunday I am comfortable in this traditional and often beautiful setting whereas during the week I am found in ‘downtown Medway’ in pubs, coffee shops and the gym looking to see what God is doing in the normal everyday lives of people and looking for connections. Here I feel equally comfortable.

A while ago, particularly while on placement with Ian and Moot, I came to the belief that whatever develops or emerges should not deny or ignore what the church has developed in the past or the journey the church has come from. While some of that stuff may need to be re-assessed and thought about, other stuff will be kept and possibly re-framed to be used in a different, postmodern if you like, setting.

I think it is important to consider where the church has come from and what can be useful and helpful for today’s spiritual tourists or pilgrims. It’s so easy to say a lot of stuff needs to be rejected, wheareas actually, some of the symbolic stuff that we have lost can be quite powerful and helpful for people as they develop their understanding of their relationship with God, and from that develop their knowledge of who God is.

I believe knowledge comes from experience. As people experience God, their knowledge of God develops. Traditional practices such as incense, candles, chanting can be things that help draw people today into the presence of God in a way they have never been able to before. Practices from the past that were essentially there to help people from a non-book culture understand more of God could be useful again as we move deeper into a virtual cyber world where many people could equally be classified as coming from a ‘non-book culture’.

Standing in both worlds is not always comfortable and sometimes it feels pretty weird, often it can be draining with the odd spark of excitement here and there, but as I said earlier – it does give lots of opportunities for a smile with God.

succesful campaign

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From Burma Campaign website – just to show your emails do have an effect:

On Wednesday October 12th we asked you, our supporters to contact Cotton Traders and tell them why you would be boycotting them until they pulled out of Burma.

Today, Friday October 14th 2008, Cotton Traders contacted the Burma Campaign UK. It looks like they are pulling out of Burma. Over the next few hours and days we will work to confirm this with the company.

Thank you to everyone who contacted the company. Your emails had a huge effect.

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Last night I experienced a myriad of emotions as I left my house to travel to the Thursday night Curry Club at Wetherspoons. For a change I was not nervous or fearful of my reception of crossing the threshold; for this night I was going to meet with people who want to re-imaginge church. This night I was meeting people who had responded to an email and blog that I wrote earlier in the year which you can read here. (Then, as with now, if you know anyone this may be appropriate for please pass it to them).

My emotions tonight were a mixture of excitement, disbelief, hope rooted in a passion to serve.

Tonight 4 of us met, we chatted, we ate, we laughed, we asked questions, we shared views, we tried to imagine, we dreamed dreams.

Tonight was not church. Tonight was about listening, dreaming, respecting and was maybe even a very small step towards the development of community. The gathering tonight may develop further, or may end. I’m pretty certain we will talk more.

Tonight we were engaging with each other, with things of God and we were doing this in the real world and it was good. I think we all experienced something of God as we chatted in a pretty normal way in a pretty normal pub and looked, errr pretty normal!

If God takes this and weaves it into something that will be great and I’d love to be part of that, if God doesn’t that takes nothing away from this evening – God was still there joining that discussion. God is in the dream.

Boycott Cotton Traders for Burma

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I received this today from the Burma Campaign UK:

Dear Friends,

Do you want your money to end up in the pockets of Burma’s Generals?

Today we launch a boycott campaign against Cotton Traders because a Burma Campaign UK investigation has discovered that they are producing clothes in Burma.

Clothing exports are an important source of income for Burma’s brutal military dictatorship. Burmese trade unions have called on companies not to source clothing from Burma, as the clothing exports help to fund the dictatorship. Burma appeals to manufacturers because of its very cheap labour, ban on trade unions and lack of health and safety laws. Cotton Traders thinks it is acceptable to produce clothes in a country where factory wages are as low as 5p an hour and a factory employee working 60 hours a week could earn just £3.

More than 130 major high street clothing retailers, including M&S, Next, ASDA, H&M, Debenhams, House of Fraser and BHS, have policies not to source from Burma. However Cotton Traders are still make clothes in Burma.

BOYCOTT COTTON TRADERS
Support our boycott campaign and write to Cotton Traders now: http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/cottontraders_action.html. Tell them to stop sourcing from Burma and that you will be boycotting them until they stop.

Click on this link and send them a message using our automated form, it will take just 2 minutes of your time: http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/cottontraders_action.html

Thank you

Johnny Chatterton and the Burma Campaign UK team